Critics: ICE casting too wide a net in jail effort

ICE program is casting a wide netDatabase is helping to identify dangerous illegal immigrants in jail, but critics see a troubling trend

SUSAN CARROLL, Copyright 2009 Houston Chonicle

Published
5:30 am CDT, Sunday, July 12, 2009

Inmates wait in the Harris County jail as their fingerprints are checked against a Department of Homeland Security database.

Inmates wait in the Harris County jail as their fingerprints are checked against a Department of Homeland Security database.

Photo: Billy Smith II, Chronicle

Photo: Billy Smith II, Chronicle

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Inmates wait in the Harris County jail as their fingerprints are checked against a Department of Homeland Security database.

Inmates wait in the Harris County jail as their fingerprints are checked against a Department of Homeland Security database.

Photo: Billy Smith II, Chronicle

Critics: ICE casting too wide a net in jail effort

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A little after 3 a.m. Dec. 12, Carlos Garcia-Hernandez was booked into Harris County Jail on an aggravated assault charge, accused of slicing a man's nose down to the bone after a disagreement at a birthday party.

At the jail, the first in the country with full access to a Department of Homeland Security database that contains millions of immigration records, a Harris County detention officer ran Garcia-Hernandez's fingerprints.

Within minutes the system found a hit. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had deported Garcia-Hernandez in November 2007 after a string of convictions including marijuana possession and escaping from law enforcement custody, the system showed.

The DHS system also showed Garcia-Hernandez had two outstanding murder warrants in Mexico. “A year ago, we wouldn't have gotten that,” said Lt. M. Lindsay, the point man for the Harris County Sheriff's Office's efforts to identify suspected illegal immigrants in the jails.

The database is part of an ICE program dubbed “Secure Communities,” which aims to identify and deport the most dangerous illegal immigrants in U.S. jails and prisons. Since Harris County started using the database in October, participation in the program has grown to 70 sites in the U.S., including 39 in Texas.

In the program's first six months, more than 266,000 fingerprint submissions were run through the system nationally, generating more than 32,000 “matches” for suspects with both an immigration history and record of a prior conviction or charge. That includes 5,369 matches in Harris County.

But critics see a troubling trend in the data.

Nationally, only 15 percent of the 6,130 suspects that authorities filed paperwork to detain after finding a match in the system were classified as “aggravated felons” — the agency's primary target group. The percentage was even lower in Harris County, with fewer that one in 10 suspects falling into that category, according to ICE statistics from late October to the end of April, the most recent available.

Too broad a sweep?

Supporters of the program point to cases like Garcia-Hernandez's as a sign that the system is working. But critics say ICE's data indicates that, so far, the agency is casting a broad net for suspected illegal immigrants in the jails, and is sweeping up some offenders who do not pose a danger to the public along with more hardened criminals.

Many of the Harris County offenders eventually end up in an immigration detention center in Polk County, where they wear uniforms color-coded to show the level of crime they were convicted of committing.

On a Thursday in June, a handful of the offenders in the detention center courtroom were dressed in red jumpsuits, denoting a higher risk level. But most wore uniforms for low-risk detainees,including a few identified through the immigration database in Harris County Jail after being stopped for traffic violations.

Secure Communities, which debuted in the fall, aims to target the “most egregious” of the estimated 300,000 to 450,000 suspected illegal immigrants eligible for deportation each year from the nation's prisons and jails, said Richard Rocha, an ICE spokesman.

The system works by simultaneously checking suspects' fingerprint submissions against the FBI's database of criminal records and DHS' master immigration database.

When a suspect has a “match” in the system, ICE officials are electronically notified, and can file paperwork to detain suspects before their release from local custody.

The database checks, however, are not foolproof. Some illegal immigrants slip into the U.S. without being arrested by immigration officials, and would not be identified as undocumented through the fingerprint check.

And a match in the system does not necessarily mean a suspect is eligible for deportation. Lawful permanent residents convicted of misdemeanors often are not subject to deportation.

Officials praise system

Still, local and federal authorities said the system has significantly helped identify suspected illegal immigrants, particularly those who have multiple fake identifications and aliases.

“We have the capability now of identifying foreign-born inmates that have committed a crime within minutes if they're in the ICE system — versus waiting for hours or missing them altogether,” Lindsay said.

“Because, let's face it, we were missing a bunch,” he said.

A Houston Chronicle investigation published last fall found that ICE officials had allowed scores of suspected illegal immigrants — including some with violent criminal histories and prior deportations — to cycle through local jails. ICE agents were filing paperwork to detain only one in four suspects who told jailers they were in the country illegally from the summer of 2007 through early 2008.

Using the DHS database, authorities filed paperwork to detain 159 suspected illegal immigrants in Harris County classified as aggravated felons based on a prior conviction or charge during the program's first six months. Another 1,624 suspects marked for possible deportation in Harris County through the program were detained for more minor crimes, ranging from trespassing to DWI, the records show.

Lindsay said the database and a federal program that trained nine jailers to assist immigration agents has changed screening at the jail “100 percent” in the past year.

Critics such as Joan Friedland, immigration policy director with the National Immigration Law Center in Washignton, D.C., are concerned that a low percentage of suspects marked for deportation through the program were in ICE's target group of aggravated felons.

“What we're beginning to see with the numbers is that the priorities are not being followed,” Friedland said.

ICE defends efforts

Rocha said ICE is committed to targeting the most dangerous criminals.

“Any individual who is here in the country illegally, ICE may choose to enter into removal proceedings,” Rocha said. “ICE is focused on the most egregious offenders. However, we will remove other individuals as resources permit.”

The Rev. Diane McGehee, a pastor and attorney who has protested Houston Mayor Bill White's plans to expand the DHS database and other immigration enforcement programs to the city jails, said high-profile crimes by illegal immigrants are highlighted in the media and “smear the entire population.”

In the first six months after the Harris County Sheriff's Office started using the immigration database, the computer system flagged 5,369 suspects booked into Harris County's jails as having a prior immigration and criminal history. That is roughly 10 percent of the total 55,852 submissions checked through the system during that time.

That data, although limited, shows that the percentage of suspects identified as immigrants with prior records in the jails is significantly lower than the overall foreign-born population, which is estimated at 28 percent in Houston, according to census data.

“I 100-percent support efforts to get violent criminals off the streets, but we've got to do it in a way that really targets that audience and not other innocent people,” McGehee said.